


Call me but love

by feroxargentea



Category: due South
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M, Remix, Soul Bond, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Trope Subversion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-14
Updated: 2020-10-14
Packaged: 2021-03-06 20:48:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,595
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26215138
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/feroxargentea/pseuds/feroxargentea
Summary: They’d been sleeping together for weeks before Ray found Fraser’s soulmark.
Relationships: Benton Fraser/Ray Kowalski
Comments: 36
Kudos: 103
Collections: Remix Revival 2020





	Call me but love

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mific](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mific/gifts).
  * Inspired by [What's In a Name?](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5310704) by [mific](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mific/pseuds/mific). 



> Written for Remix Revival 2020. In mific's original fic, Fraser and Ray develop soulmarks of each other's names and struggle to come to terms with it, until they finally meet. This is not that story.
> 
> Grateful thanks to cj2017 and Kittkat for beta.
> 
> (The title is from the same passage of Romeo and Juliet as mific's original title.)

* * *

They’d been sleeping together for weeks before Ray found Fraser’s soulmark.

It hadn’t surprised him that Fraser was cagey about undressing. Fraser had a body to die for, but he had that whole Canadian prudishness thing going on too, where an inch of bare skin could reduce him to a stuttering mess. Ray bet no one up in Iglooland ever got totally naked. It was a mystery how they procreated at all, except he figured they had one week of summer a year and all the kids got born nine months later.

So being with Fraser meant a whole lot of “Close the blinds, Ray, if you wouldn’t mind,” and “Turn the lights out, Ray, thank you kindly,” and “Bedding is vital for insulation, Ray, even if your apartment does have central heating.” And sure, they’d christened every room in the place, in multiple ways, but there was a whole lot more clothing involved than Ray had expected. Not that he was _complaining,_ exactly. Once he realized how much Fraser liked being stroked through fabric (and sucked, and licked, and bitten), and that Fraser would gasp and buck upward when Ray ran his fingers under the damp cloth and touched wet, bare skin at last—yeah, he was pretty much okay with that.

Until the day he found the Band-Aid loose in the bed. He’d noticed Fraser had some kind of injury on his shoulder, with a neat rectangular dressing taped over it. If he stopped and thought about it, he’d maybe noticed it was taking a long time to heal. But it wasn’t until he rolled onto something scratchy on the sheet and discovered the Band-Aid, peeled off and stuck to itself, that he thought to ease the corner of the comforter back from Fraser’s sleeping form and check the skin it had come off.

And there it was. A reddened patch on Fraser’s right biceps, inflamed by weeks of Band-Aid glue, and in the middle of it the clear black lettering of a soulmark.

For a few seconds, Ray just stared at it. Then he leaned closer, holding his breath, until the individual letters swam into focus. The initial “V” was in bold script, with curving tails that made it look as though some old-fashioned scribe had inked it onto Fraser’s arm with a quill pen.

“Fuck,” Ray whispered. _“Fuck.”_

* * *

He probably should have gotten up, done something, except he couldn't figure out what—apart from punching the wall until he lost his deposit, which was tempting but futile—so he lay back down and waited. In any other circumstance, the chance to watch Fraser sleep might have been kinda nice. Fraser was usually up before dawn, taking Diefenbaker for a run and getting a head start on his Dudley Do-Righting. But they’d had a long night, collapsing into bed after an eight-hour shift stretched to eighteen in the interrogation room, and daylight was already streaming around the edges of the blinds, casting bright stripes across the bed and illuminating Fraser’s exposed shoulder.

Ray settled back on his pillow, listening to Fraser’s breathing, and watching the comforter rise and fall in a rhythm he’d let himself get used to, these last few weeks. It had taken him more than a year to coax Fraser to this point, and he was damned if he was going to let it go without a fight. He tried to stay motionless, not look at the soulmark, not even breathe. In the end, though, he had to shift to ease the cramping in his legs, and Fraser stirred.

“Ray?” he asked sleepily. Then his eyes snapped open, and his hand went straight to his shoulder. He bent to snatch up the t-shirt lying beside the bed.

“Don’t,” Ray said quickly, reaching for him. “It’s okay, you don’t have to.”

Fraser froze, staring at Ray’s outstretched arm as if it were some alien object he’d never encountered before. His expression flickered through fear and anger and back to fear, before shuttering completely. “I don’t know what you mean,” he said.

Ray sat up, keeping his movements slow and careful. “It’s _okay,_ Fraser. I don’t mind.”

Which was bullshit—the whole thing sucked rocks, if he was honest—but being kinda-pissed-off-at-the-universe-in-general was his default setting. He could deal. The problem was getting _Fraser_ to understand that. Because Ray and words, they weren’t buddies. Fraser had always been the words guy here.

“I’ve read the file,” Ray began. “I know who she was.”

Fraser gave a hollow laugh. “You’re one up on me, then. I knew her better than I’ve known any other woman, and I still have no idea who she was.”

Ray studied Fraser’s face: blankness with a barely concealed edge of panic. He shuffled closer and slid an arm round him, exhaling hard when Fraser made no move to pull away. “She was your soulmate, Fraser. Which is okay. No big deal.”

Fraser was holding himself very still, his face turned aside. “My grandmother thought it was.”

Ray hesitated. Fraser rarely mentioned his upbringing except in the vaguest terms, just enough to give an impression of sternness, austerity, and the sort of old-fashioned discipline that Ray himself would have stuck in the file marked “child abuse.”

“I hadn’t really thought about any of it until my soulmark appeared,” Fraser said softly. “I’d only ever noticed other boys, if I noticed anyone at all. But when my mark faded in, it proved my grandmother was right. It proved God’s will was that I purify my mind of everything except His plan for me.”

Ray grimaced before he could stop himself. “Sheesh. How’d that go?”

Fraser was staring down at the sheets. “It’s not difficult to clear your mind, Ray. Work hard enough, and you won’t have energy left to think at all.”

_“Fuck.”_

“Well, no, that was precisely what I wasn’t doing. By the time I got through Depot and secured a posting a long way from any temptation, I hadn’t so much as touched another human being in years.”

Ray took a deep breath and let it out again slowly. Picturing Fraser alone in some frozen wilderness was only going to make him mad, and Fraser didn’t need anger from him right now.

“But you knew Victoria was out there somewhere,” he said. “You knew you were gonna meet her eventually. I mean, that’s how it works, right?”

Fraser was chewing at his lip. “Fate is fate, Ray. It would have been a sin not to have accepted that. And when I did finally meet her, it was…well, it was terrifying, admittedly, but it was a relief too. You may not believe me—I suspect Ray Vecchio never did—but it was _good,_ the time I spent with her. It was good to have someone I knew for certain was right for me.”

“Even if it didn’t _feel_ right?”

Fraser’s head dipped lower. “I tried my best, Ray. My feelings were hardly the point.”

“Jesus Christ. And you never stopped trying.” Ray thought back to the case file he’d read, and the sealed note that Vecchio had left for him. “I could never figure out why you did that. Kept going back to her, after everything she did.”

“Well, now you know.”

“Jesus _Christ.”_

Fraser closed his eyes. “I really am sorry, Ray. It was unforgivable of me to have tried to mislead you. If you’ll give me five minutes, I’ll collect my things and…”

“Don’t you fucking dare!”

Fraser blinked and then darted a glance at him, his expression full of misery and hope.

Ray squeezed Fraser’s shoulder, shaking him just a little. “God, for a smart guy you’re so dumb sometimes.” He shifted round to face him and pointed to his own shoulder. “See this here?”

Fraser’s gaze followed Ray’s finger. “Your tattoo?”

“Yeah. Remember how it was still itching like hell, the day I met you?”

Fraser nodded slowly. “You told me it was newly done, and I offered you some ointment for it.”

“Yeah. Which was gross, by the way.”

“It didn’t work?”

“Worked fine, just stunk the place out.” Ray squared his shoulders and went on before he lost his nerve. “I got it done the day the divorce came through. When everything was final, no hope left. I didn’t even think about it, just saw this tattoo place and went straight in. Didn’t know what to pick, but I had this Champion spark plug box still in my pocket from the garage, and I figured the logo would work, cover the word right up, so no one could tell.” He ran his hand over the upper half of the tattoo, its paired black and crimson blocks still stark and bold. “You’d never know it says ‘Stella’ under here.”

Fraser’s eyes went wide. “Oh,” he said very quietly.

Ray snorted. “Yeah. Stella Marie, love of my life. And she had a matching one, ‘R-A-Y’ in curly letters across her left shoulder blade. So it was fate, right? Me and her, put on this planet to love one another, and if anyone claimed otherwise, we had it right there in black and white. We would’ve been crazy to throw that away. Until she did.” He shrugged as casually as he could. “I should’ve remembered there’s a whole lot of guys out there called Ray. Hell, I should’ve remembered I’m not even one of them. Not really.”

“Oh, _Ray.”_

Ray snickered, hating the way his breath hitched in the middle. “I mean, soulmarks are vestigial anyway, right? That’s what the textbooks say. Most people don’t even have one, so it’s not like you can’t do without them. It’s like, when I was fifteen I got rushed into the hospital ’cause I had a pain in my belly so bad I couldn’t breathe, and they took my appendix out. It’s the exact same thing. Didn’t need it, better off without it.”

Fraser reached up to caress Ray’s tattoo, his thumb stroking gently across the logo. “Well, strictly speaking, the appendix is no longer considered vestigial by most medical authorities, but it’s true that we retain various other vestigial bodily structures. The coccyx, for instance—”

“The…huh?”

“The coccyx, the tailbone, an evolutionary leftover from our distant past. And wisdom teeth, similarly.”

Ray nodded. He loved the way Fraser sometimes just _got_ stuff. And if he went overboard on the big words now and then, that didn’t matter, as long as the two of them were on the same page.

“Yeah,” Ray said, “and…and pizza.”

Fraser raised an eyebrow.

“I mean, I’m all for pizza,” Ray continued, “don’t get me wrong, but that urge to load up on carbs and fats all the time, like Dief has? No limits, no cutoff? That ain’t great. That’s a vestige I’d say sayonara to and no regrets.”

Fraser rubbed at his jaw, his expression thoughtful. “Well, it’s true that we and our companion animals evolved to exploit ecosystems substantially different from the ones we now inhabit, and that the behavioral script our genes attempt to impose on us isn’t necessarily adaptive in the modern environment.”

Ray took a moment to parse that. “Right,” he said. “It’s like me being with you. I oughta be out there, spreading my genes around, and instead I just wanna get into your pants. Sometimes you gotta say fuck it, toss the script.”

Fraser gave one of those tiny snorts of amusement that made Ray want to roll him over and kiss him till his self-restraint gave in. Instead, he let Fraser take his hand, tracing the lifelines that branched across its palm.

“Victoria had a soulmark, too,” Fraser said quietly. “A small one, here, on the inside of her wrist.” He turned Ray’s wrist over and smoothed the network of veins beneath the skin. “Three letters, in cursive script: ‘B-E-N’. I assumed at the time that it referred to me. That was what she called me, after all: never Benton, and never Fraser, as you do; always just Ben. But in hindsight…”

Ray winced. “Lot of guys out there called Ben?”

“Exactly.”

Ray thought about that, and about the way things had been between him and Stella, before it all fell apart. “Maybe it did mean you,” he said. “Maybe you were supposed to meet, supposed to click. Maybe it was the right thing at the time. God’s plan for you, even, if you wanna call it that. Doesn’t mean it had to be permanent.”

Fraser was silent for a long time, his fingers warm in Ray’s grip. “I really am sorry,” he said at last. “I had intended to tell you at some point, but…well, I couldn’t bring myself to risk this. Us.”

“Nothin’ to be sorry for, Fraser. No one’s made any promises here. If I wanted you out, I woulda kicked you out.”

“And I’m grateful for your forbearance, believe me—”

“Hey, don’t even start.”

“—but it seems discourteous, at the least, to share your bed while bearing someone else’s name. Perhaps I ought to follow your example and have it expunged.”

“Nah.” Ray reached up to stroke the faint scar on Fraser’s chin, and with the other hand he traced the old bullet wound on Fraser’s back. “It’s like here, or here. It’s good to have reminders of where you’ve been. It’s…” He hesitated, searching for words Fraser would understand. “It’s like footprints, right? If you find a trail marker in a blizzard but your footprints are all covered up with snow, you’re not gonna know which way to turn. You gotta know where you came from to figure out where you’re going.”

Fraser gazed at him for a few seconds, his pupils wide and dark. Then he leaned in and kissed him, softly at first and then deeper, his hands burying themselves in Ray’s hair, his mouth hungry and insistent against Ray’s, until at last Ray had to pull back for breath.

“Thank you,” Fraser murmured, his fingers still caressing Ray’s scalp.

“What for?”

“For being you.”

Ray grinned at him. “Y’know, maybe it was me that got it wrong, covering my mark up. Seemed like a good idea at the time, but…”

Fraser shifted one hand down to Ray’s shoulder, his fingertips leaving warm, tingling trails across the skin. “No, I like your tattoo. I like its boldness, its sheer _straightforwardness_. It’s who you are: Ray, my champion.”

Ray laughed aloud. “Okay, that’s definitely your genes talking. You just wanna get laid.”

Fraser’s eyes crinkled in amusement. “I think I might get laid anyway.”

Ray pushed him down with one hand on his sternum, trapping him against the pillows. “Makin’ a lot of assumptions there, Frase.”

“Am I?” Fraser raised his head to nip at Ray’s collarbone, his tongue flicking out to wet the spot. And maybe there wasn’t that weird, static crackle that a soulbond would have given, but it still made Ray’s skin go hot all over. He groaned, rubbing himself against Fraser, and felt strong hands settle on his ass, pulling him closer still.

“Sometimes, Ray, I can read you like a book.”

“Yeah? What am I saying now?”

But Fraser merely shook his head, smiling in the way that made Ray’s chest ache with a deep, uncomplicated happiness. Ray bent down, finding his answer in the heat of Fraser’s tongue, in the way Fraser gasped and pushed deeper into Ray’s mouth, his body straining up against Ray’s.

This was good. This was _right._ Ray knew that with every fiber of his soul. And words, it turned out, weren’t needed at all.


End file.
